Ernst: Can farmers market produce too many vendors?

Count Michelle Silva among a new breed of farmers. She's a city cousin, growing tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, herbs and other vegetables in her backyard.

Silva's techniques are sophisticated enough that she started a business, Passion for Produce, and has a surplus year-round. So she decided to open a booth and sell her produce at the Phillippi Farmhouse Market near her home in south Sarasota.

That's where the trouble started.

The management rejected Silva's application. The market already has enough produce vendors, she was told.

Now wait a minute, she said. This market, open every Wednesday from October to April at a Sarasota County park on U.S. 41, has 46 booth spaces.

Four of them sell fresh produce.

Four.

After being turned down three times, Silva started a petition on www.change.org — a website for petitions — asking the county commissioners to step in. She also asked signers to give their reasoning for supporting her.

Almost 500 have signed. Here are two typical comments:

From Caitlin McMullen, Sarasota: "The best farmers markets out there are the ones where you can't even count the number of local organic farmers present offering their products. This ... promotes trade and bartering amongst farmers, as well as promoting a greater access to variety and choice for the consumers, not to mention a much friendlier and happening scene at the market!"

From Cheryl Kindred, Sarasota: "We love the market at Phillippi Creek, but find we have a difficult time finding all the produce we need. The organic selection is especially lacking. We'd attend more often (we go one to two times a month) if we could get everything on the list there. And we LOVE local foods!"

That's the consumer point of view.

The vendors see it differently.

"We have to make money or we're not going to do it," says Tim Brown of Brown Groves in Parrish. Brown raises citrus and sells citrus and vegetables at Phillippi. He also manages the market and was one of those on the steering committee that rebuffed Silva.

That decision has the support of Todd Underhill, president of the company doing business as Geraldson Community Farm in Bradenton, which also sells at Phillippi.

"You don't want to saturate any farmers market with any type of vendor," he says. "When another vendor comes in, you do see an impact if they're selling the same thing as you."

The Phillippi market has plenty of company in "protecting" its incumbents. Markets from Englewood to the long-running Saturday Downtown Farmers Market in Sarasota do the same.

In fact, the downtown market just this year rejected Geraldson for competitive reasons. And Geraldson is an established, organic-certified operation with a solid reputation.

Yet, while market review committees — often comprising vendors with an admitted conflict of interest — reject applicants who want to sell locally grown produce, the public is crying out for greater access to precisely those products.

It's a relatively new tension in Southwest Florida, and in a way, a good one.

The federal government, through the Department of Agriculture, has been pushing for Americans to eat healthier foods, in particular more fresh fruits and vegetables.

And some people are taking heed, creating a demand for the type of produce that can be grown on small farms, close to, or even within, urban areas.

Lacking a traditional agricultural distribution network, urban farmers need places to sell, and that's why we're seeing an upshoot in the number of farmers markets. Sarasota now has at least eight, some seasonal, some year-round, operating from Wednesdays through Sundays.

Silva actually represents an ideal urban farmer. She's been at it about 10 years, growing a surprising number of plants on a portion of her half-acre residential lot.

In one plot, she raises lettuce and other crops on styrofoam rafts floating in water. Tilapia waste pumped in from an aquarium provides the nutrients to the plants.

Tomatoes, baby salad greens and chard share space in another section, and there's plenty of room for more crops.

If she ever gets to sell at the Phillippi market, she'll be just about as local as any vendor can get. She lives three miles from the site.

More to the point, if there's no place for someone like Silva, one has to think the agricultural buy-local, eat-local, eat-healthy movement will not ultimately succeed in this area.

Underhill points out that the local food industry is in its infancy in Southwest Florida. Referring to studies that show customers don't want to travel more than three to five miles to buy from a farmers market, he suggests more farmers markets, rather than markets with open-door policies.

That's certainly one answer. The Phillippi market, alone, has a waiting list of 27, although most are not produce vendors.

County parks staff met Thursday afternoon with representatives from the Cooperative Extension Service to discuss, in part, what might be done to expand sales opportunities for small agricultural businesses, parks director Carolyn Brown says.

In the meantime, consumers aware of Silva's predicament have to be asking themselves what else they're missing because of what they see as misplaced protectionism.

Peter Burkard, an urban farm pioneer who has sold at the Sarasota market for 35 years, has signed Silva's petition. He says vendors often don't see the big picture.

"Some people have an almost irrational fear of competition," he says. "I've learned not to fear it. If I had that many years and couldn't develop a local following, I'd want to look in the mirror.

"When you see markets in other states, there are lots of farmers. That's why they call it a farmers market."